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DiManno: Tapping ‘exploding’ Lake Kivu

LAKE KIVU, EASTERN CONGO- So placid and refreshing on the surface, a gentle breeze rippling cat’s paws as fishermen cast their drifting nets from skiffs that look like giant water bugs.

So combustible and toxic in its depths, where lie the blanching bones of massacred Tutsis and a lethal alchemy of percolating gases.

While quiet in its very deep stillness and girdled by misty blue mountains, Lake Kivu —in the mid-section of the Great Lakes Region along the sweeping trench of Africa’s Rift Valley — is a potential killer basin of water, one of only three “exploding’’ lakes in the world.

Infamously, it was also the dumping ground for an untold number Rwandan Tutsis murdered in the mass carnage of Hutu-unleashed genocide in 1994 and the revenge slaughter of Tutsi-on-Hutu that followed, a less dramatic but more protracted derangement born of unquenchable ethnic hatred.

On a sun-dappled morning, making the two-hour crossing by motor launch from Goma to Bukavu — respectively, the provincial capitals of North and South Kivu — all is calm and dreamy as the spectacular shoreline slips by and then the hump of Idjwi Island, at the centre of the lake, where 90,000 people live in a thick freckle of villages, blithely ignoring what many scientists warn is a catastrophe biding.

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On one side a twin-set of active volcanoes, on the other a lake silently seething, and in between a jungle canopy bolthole for violent rebel factions, the incessantly hostile roster of Tutsi and Hutu and Mai-Mai fighters, who still clash like it’s 1994.

But Lake Kivu looks so benign. Its crystal waters are replete with fish, including succulent Nile tilapia and the Tanga sardines that were introduced to the aquatic ecosystem here in 1959, forming the basis of a successful pelagic zone fishing industry. More than 6,000 fishermen now make their livelihood on the lake, putting out from the Congo and Rwandan shores, each country claiming one half of the 2,700-square-mile (43,452 km) basin.

The valley on which it sits is slowly being pulled apart, causing volcanic activity that creates what’s known as “overturns’’ — violent eruptions deep in the lake that send carbon dioxide surging upwards, displacing water, with the capacity of releasing deadly C02 and methane into the air, enough to some day suffocate all wildlife, livestock and humans in the area.

Imagine a bottle of shaken cola, uncapped. Then imagine , instead of pop gushing, 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide — a little under 2 per cent of the amount released annually into the atmosphere by human fossil fuel burning — and 55 billion cubic metres of dissolved methane gas currently lurking at a depth of 300 metres.

As if the Congolese, with guerrilla wars and withering poverty, endemic malaria and sporadic outbursts of Ebola, not to mention the most active volcano on the continent, doesn’t have enough to worry about. Thus, no, the two million people who live around Lake Kivu are not going to fret about maybe being suddenly gassed to death, keeling over where they stand.

“Congo is no place for the weak of heart,’’ a wizened fisherman had observed, back on the Goma dock, as he expertly darned his net with calloused fingers. “There as so many ways to be killed in this country.’’

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There is no record of Lake Kivu ever killing anybody, though scientists speculate there has been massive biological extinction in the body of water and hereabouts on a millennial timetable, triggered by volcanic activity overturns. A high gas concentration — say, from lava spilling into Lake Kivu — could again heat the water, force up the methane to spare an explosion, simultaneously releasing all the carbon dioxide in a doomsday scenario as gasses rolled off the lake, smothering towns and villages and spawning tsunamis.

There had been no documented history of Lake Nyos in Cameroon exploding either, until it did exactly that in 1986, asphyxiating some 1,800 people. Lake Monoun, also in Cameroon, similarly exploded and asphyxiated 37 people in 1984.

Scientists are still trying to fathom the mysteries of exploding lakes, coming late to the phenomenon. What’s known is that the amount of methane and carbon dioxide in Lake Kivu — for reasons unknown — has increased 30 per cent in the last 30 years. While the layers of water provide a kind of flexible lid overtop, the lake is not as stably stratified as it apparently was in the past. A sudden heat flux from one of the nearby volcanoes or some other meteorological event could cause a massive overturn, or rollover.

Thus far, there’s been little useful tapping of the lake’s gases; on the Congo side, just enough small-scale extraction to run the boilers at a nearby brewery. But there are loads of electricity to be exploited in Kivu’s depths. Rwanda has embarked on an ambitious, $350 million plan to extract methane for gas-fired electricity. The scheme would see a gas extraction facility built on a giant barge with methane siphoned to the surface, with enough methane gas in the lake to meet Rwanda’s energy needs for the next 400 years.

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